Knowledge-based Information Resource Management System for Materials of Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor

In the development of advanced fast reactors, materials and coolant/material interactions pose a critical barrier for higher temperature and longer core life designs. For advanced burner reactors (sodium cooled) such as EBR-II and FFTF, experience has shown that the qualified structural materials and fuel cladding severely limits the economic performance. In other liquid metal cooled reactor concepts, advanced materials and better understanding and control of coolant and materials interactions are necessary for realizing the potentials. Liquid sodium has been selected as the primary coolant candidate for Gen. IV nuclear energy systems. Global Nuclear Partnership (GNEP) Advanced Burned Reactor (ABR) has identified materials improvement as a major thrust to improve Fast Reactor (FR) economics, Researches from universities, national laboratories and related industrial participants have been continuously generating invaluable data and knowledge about materials and their interactions with coolants in the past few decades. Under the consideration of cost and time constraints, the paradigm of designing and implementing a successful Gen IV Nuclear Energy Systems can be shifted and updated via the integration of information and internet technologies. Such efforts can be better visualized by implementing collective (centralized or distributed) data storages to serve the community with organized material data sets. Material property data provided by MatWeb.com and the ongoing development of web-based GEN IV material handbook are few examples. From system design perspective, sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) proposed in the GEN IV system have been significantly developed. According to the GEN IV ten-year program plan, current R&D work will be pointed to demonstration of the design and safety characteristics, and design optimization. Major activities defined in the current SFR R&D Plan scopes can be summarized to (1) ensuring the needs and goals of the program are followed by GEN IV International Forum (GIF) countries, (2) document and share the R&D progress and accomplishments and (3) integrate relevant activities from GIF SFR R&D with Global Nuclear Partnership (GNEP) Program. All of those activities follow the path of data generation, analysis, knowledge discovery and finally decision making and implementation. We are proposing to create a modularized web-based information system with models to systematically catalog and analyze existing data and guide the new development and testing to acquire new data. Technically speaking, information retrieval and knowledge discovery tools will be implemented for researchers with both information look-up options from material database and technology/development gap analysis from intelligent agent and reporting components. The goal of the system is not only to provide another database, but also to create a sharable and expandable platform-free, location-free online system for research institutes and industrial partners